Beginners Guide to Amazon Associates

One of the most popular affiliate programs around is Amazon associates. Stop just buying from Amazon and start getting paid to sell their endless list of products. One of the easiest ways to get started with an online business, is through affiliate programs. One of the biggest ones out there is the Amazon Associates program. The overall concept is pretty simple, sign up with the Amazon Associates affiliate program and earn commissions by sending Amazon customers.

Like any internet marketing platform, the name of the game is traffic. When trying to make money online it’s all about the numbers. Amazon Associates is no different, but because of the huge quantity of different products, it’s very easy to carve out a niche to test and promote. If you don’t know how to research and find niches, head over and read our article on how to chose profitable niches first, then come back here.

After signing up, review their commission structure for all of the various categories of products. Most start at 4% and some can get as high as 15%. Typically the more products you can get sold, the higher the commission rate, though there are some categories, like electronics, that will limit you to 4% regardless of quantity. This is because of Amazon’s very thin profit margins on things like TVs, tablets, and more.

Once you’re familiar with what you can earn and you’ve found a niche to test out, it’s time to start building your website. Ranking naturally, or organically, is going to take some time and work, so you need to think about how you want to drive immediate traffic. This is where your overall web presence comes into play. Take the time to setup a Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr page, these will all serve as great places for some basic backlinks as well as helping you find targeted traffic. Locate one or two forums, also known as message boards, sign up and make sure to include your domain in your profile and signature, then find a couple of threads to post on. Lastly, find three to four blog posts that appear on highly ranked pages or have a lot of traffic (ie, lots of good social signals such as shares and likes). And just like that, your website is now somebody in the internet world and will begin to slowly climb the search rankings.

Now that you have a solid base to build from, continue to build your supports for the page, by promoting your social pages for more fans and followers. Make it a point to add your link in more forum posts or blog comments once or twice a week. This makes your backlinks count appear to grow much more naturally to Google and will help your organic rankings. As you monitor your traffic and stats you should begin to see a steady month over month (yes, I said month over month, not day over day) increase. The best part is, after the major work of building the site, it should take minimum time to maintain and grow it. Remember, this isn’t a millions over night process, what we are working towards is a creating a portfolio of pages and projects for you, that earn you passive income and can grow with as little input as possible once they are set up. A domain only costs you $10-15 a year, if your site is earning more than that in 12 months, you’re in the black and making profit! Now just rinse and repeat.

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Who is Mike Rioux?

Having been in internet marketing since 2006, I became a paid professional PPC manager at a large web services company in 2012. In 2014 I realized I wanted the freedom of a true IM lifestyle and GNM was born. Follow along, learn some things, and don't forget to Like Us on Facebook.